1. Field of the Invention
The present application relates to accelerating data parsing. More specifically, the present application relates to methods and apparatus for efficient hardware conversion of data into a machine accessible format.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventional software processes for parsing data such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) data have significant performance limitations. XML is described in the XML Specification 1.0 available from the World Wide Web Consortium, the entirety of which is incorporated by reference for all purposes.
XML provides several benefits over conventional HTML representations. XML allows a web client to acquire object information from two separate databases. XML provides techniques for more efficient balancing of load distribution between the web server and the web client. XML allows the presentation of the same data in different ways to different users. XML also provides mechanisms for tailoring information discovery to the needs of individuals. Because of a variety of XML benefits, XML has been growing in popularity. However, one of the constraints preventing the even more rapid adoption of XML is that XML parsing is extremely resource intensive. Software modules in conventional systems are provided to read XML data and provide access to their structure and content. The software modules may be part of an operating system or an application or may be a stand-alone utility. However, using the software modules to process XML data requires several times the amount of processing resources used to process many other types of data. Processing resources can be scarce particularly in systems such as handheld devices or web enabled mobile phones.
Consequently, it is desirable to provide methods and apparatus for improving the efficiency of XML data processing and parsing.